The Tuolumne is one of the largest of our Sierra rivers, much greater in volume than its quieter neighbor, the Merced. Its falls, often of an imposing height, are none of them sheer, none of them giving that impression of pure joy of living with which the Merced waters leap into the great Nevada abyss. For the Tuolumne's is a sterner, stormier course, beset with giant rocks against which even its splendid strength is impotently hurled, and its joy is the joy of battles. But it is a strange thing, standing beside one of these giant cataracts where the ground shakes with the impact and where every voice of wind or living creature is silenced in the roar of the maddened waters, to see under what a delicate fabric this Titan's force is veiled--a billowing, gossamer texture, iris-tinted, with jeweled spray flying high upon the wind. Then came Hetch-Hetchy, after two days of strenuous pursuit of the Tuolumne's galloping waters. When we were there Hetch-Hetchy was a valley untrammeled, carpeted with grass and flowers, walled by mighty cliffs, traversed by the unfettered Tuolumne. Of late, as all the outdoor world knows, its freedom has been bartered and its fate sealed--the fate of being drowned beneath a reservoir whose waters are to quench the thirst of San Francisco. Probably, from an engineering standpoint, the knell of Hetch-Hetchy is a masterpiece; perhaps economically it is wisdom; but none who have delighted in the valley's hospitality but deem it tragedy of the darkest die. Be that as it may, the waters are yet unstored and Hetch-Hetchy is still a camp-ground, and for the city-bred or the city-weary it offers panacea beyond compare as it has since the beginning of all things, when cities were as little thought of as reservoirs. Regarding the horrors of industrial civilization, William Morris once urged humanitarian effort "until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where the beasts live and the streets where men live." And Hetch-Hetchy, even in a region of loveliness, is perhaps Nature's strongest sermon in her wordless arraignment of the physical follies of civilization--at least that so-called civilization which is wound around with unashamed artificialities and the ugliness of urban existence. Our week in Hetch-Hetchy we wished might have been a month, but the calendar moves relentlessly in the Sierra as elsewhere, and only too soon the days were numbered until we must abandon Yosemite Park and strike southward into other mountain regions, with other companionship. So back we "hiked" to our valley base camp, rescued what the bears had left of our stored property, and renewed acquaintance with the railroad at Merced.